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Pricing of the i newspaper: Editor on why 20p, and not free

The editor of the i newspaper, Stefano Hatfield, was asked at the Society of Editors conference today why the newspaper was priced at 20p and not given away free.

The i first launched in October 2010. Now, more than two years on, Hatfield said the pricing point “works both to establish a quality proposition and it’s also helpful in supermarkets establishing a value proposition”.

If you’d have gone free, in consumers mind [it would have] immediately been up against Metro and we didn’t want to be up against Metro, we wanted to be up against the Guardian, Times, Telegraph.

He added that when the newspaper is sold in supermarkets, therefore, the 20p pricing “is an advantage”.

He added that the “key thing is it’s an active choice to purchase the paper … rather than having it just given to you.”

The latest results from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, which published national newspaper circulation reports for October on Friday (9 November), showed a 44 per cent increase year-on-year in average daily circulation for the i, which reached 304,691 in October this year.